DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

 

Mary Knight-McKenna

Associate Professor, Education

Elon University

Carolyn Stuart

Associate Professor, Education

Elon University

 

Overview: Developing Partnership with Families

 

As special education professors we have the responsibility of preparing teacher candidates, who are for the most part Caucasian middle-class females, to work in public schools where there is a growing population of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students. These demographics mirror the situation in elementary public schools where many of the teachers are White, middle-class women and the school population is diverse in terms of race, socio-economic class, ethnicity, and religion. 

 

The teacher candidates entering the Special Education Program at Elon bring a strong ethic of care for the children they plan to teach. They are eager to learn effective methods for teaching students with various disabilities. Rarely do they begin the program thinking about the families of the students they will teach. As their professors, we believe that it is essential for teachers to develop partnerships with families. Each child has an interesting, complex history and people in his or her life who know how that child learns best. To discount the people who are raising the child and have known him or her from birth is unwise and potentially detrimental.

 

Unfortunately, as is well documented in the literature, many teacher candidates do not bring positive views about CLD families, rather they frequently exhibit stereotypical thinking. When the teacher candidates encounter families of students who act differently than their own parents, the candidates can wrongly jump to the conclusion that diverse families do not care about their children’s education. Often candidates consider families to be the source of problems and as a consequence avoid interactions with them.

 

Identifying and changing stereotypical thinking is a transformative process. We set the goal of preparing our candidates to graduate with the knowledge, skills and dispositions   to form beneficial, productive, respectful partnerships with CLD families.

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.